Listen: Eiffel Tower, Sola And Holland discussed on Masters in Business

"Serious and sustained set of problems over the next fifty years. What what's your thinking about energy looks like parts of the world are transitioning to renewables somewhat slowly, but it's moving forward. Tell tell us about energy technology and energy has been unexpectedly. Great that's moving at great speed has a thousands of new enterprises trying to push it along and in general, it's been a very pleasant surprise. Meaning the cost of come down the efficiency of wind have come down more than anyone dreamt possible thirty forty years ago. The cost of solo have come down. The same solar is now equal or cheaper than coal. Is that a fair statement, a modern utility plant to Sola all wind in any one of half a dozen better states is cheaper to construct and run than it is merely to run an existing coal plant. Wow, has fully costed cheaper than the marginal cost of the best nuclear and the best coal plots. Do you see much of a future from nuclear my? My motto is never underestimate science. And also, unfortunately, never underestimate sapiens ability to screw it up. But in terms of nuclear there are endless attempts to come up with what you might call the generation fusion of trying to bypass some of the problems that have slowed them down for twenty thirty years based on the new technologies there was there was a buzz a couple of years ago about thirty. Mm reactors that kind of came in and even on fishing thorium or new engineering tricks small-scale, you can't rule them out. If you come back in thirty forty years, I think there's maybe a fifty fifty shot that one or the other will have come through the with something that is helpful. Of course, by then energy storage, which is the key to wind and solar may have become so cheap that it's that it's not really necessary. Even even if it's technically feasible. Solar and wind which are continuing to decline, by the way out into the distant future aspires. One can see just give you one example of that. And that is that the wins over the ocean of seventy percent faster than the winds on land and the bigger the wind tower much more efficient, it becomes it's the swept area. So that a twenty four blade doesn't give you twice the energy of a ten foot blade you four times. And as you go up, the wind speed increases and the power of a windmill is a cube of the wind speed. That's why hurricanes one hundred and forty miles an hour so much more deadly than one hundred and twenty it sounds like it should be seventeen percent. But it's fifty or sixty. And so if you can build a truly giant windmill and the ones you drive past on a cycling trip in Holland, two megawatts and the one you can order from GE if it's still around, but delivery and twenty twenty two. As twelve megawatts. And that is almost as high as the Eiffel tower believe it or not, and they are massively efficient, and you can only build them in in the oceans where the wind is more constant, and if you could find the technology to build it in the North Atlantic and have cables that could carry it back to civilization. The wind is blowing eighty plus percent of the time in the winter when you really need it in the northern hemisphere. So there is a lot of potential a sleep for the next few decades in the end, I think we will have a plentiful supply of green energy. The problem will be how long has it taken us to get that will be fully decarbonised. I should think in one hundred years, maybe sooner but the damage that will have been done by then as a carbon dioxide count rises. We have seen them being amazed including the scientists, by the way at the rate at which the damage and fires and floods and hurricanes and the speed. We build up that power drought. Some floods for agriculture. We've all been horrified by how quickly that has escalated. And if you extrapolate what is going on today, we have no hope of controlling this for one and a half degrees. That is merely an intellectual exercise. We have no real hope two degrees. We're gonna have to fight and scratch and do much better than we are doing today to keep it below three degrees. And at three degrees all manner of bad things are already happening and some of them may actually get out of control becomes self reinforcing dishes cycles. There's no guarantee that that will not happen anytime in the next few decades, quite quite fascinating coming up. We continue our."